


The Food of Love

by lady_ragnell



Series: Drugstore Flowers [3]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-03
Updated: 2012-01-03
Packaged: 2017-10-28 20:10:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/311722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lady_ragnell/pseuds/lady_ragnell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merlin's mp3 player breaks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Food of Love

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from Shakespeare, of course. The quote at the end of the fic is by Rabindranath Tagore, and I, like Arthur, Googled for it.

Merlin is halfway through unpacking a box of miscellaneous kitchen supplies that neither he nor Arthur knows how to use when his mp3 player gets stuck playing the same wailing note over and over and then dies with a little fizzling noise that sounds distressingly final.

Twenty minutes later, when Arthur gets home from work, Merlin is sitting cross-legged on their living room floor (which contains no actual furniture because they can’t agree on a couch and Arthur took one look at Merlin’s armchair and refused to have it in his residence for fear it would give him diseases) staring forlornly at the mostly-worn-off inscription on the back of his mp3 player. “Do I want to know?” Arthur asks.

“My player broke!” He waves it around a bit for good measure.

“Can’t you, you know …” Arthur wiggles his fingers around. He’s developed a paranoid idea lately that if he mentions Merlin’s magic out loud men in black suits will show up and cart him off to some secret facility. “Fix it?”

Merlin looks doubtfully at it. “I haven’t tried, but it sounded kind of dire. I think it fried a bit.”

“Well, you’ve got all the music backed up, haven’t you?” Merlin nods. “Then I can just buy you a new one.” Arthur puts down his briefcase and comes to sit next to Merlin even though it will mess up his trousers, a tribute to how much he knows Merlin loves his mp3 player.

Because he so obviously cares, Merlin doesn’t smack him as hard as he could. Arthur yelps anyway. “That’s not the point, and also I am not your charity case.”

“What’s the point, then?” Arthur gives Merlin a quick kiss on the cheek and Merlin supposes he ought to feel guilty over assaulting Arthur with this the second he got through the door, so he gives Arthur a proper welcome-home kiss. “You aren’t my charity case,” Arthur adds when he pulls away. “You give me sexual favours and help out paying things, so I think technically you’re my kept man.”

“My mum will be so proud.” Merlin goes back to staring mournfully at the inscription on the back of his player, which at this point reads _If m ic e th ood of l e, la n_ or something equally incomprehensible.

“Come on.” Arthur stands up and pulls him to his feet, then tows him to the kitchen, where there’s actual furniture, even if the table is still scattered with the detritus of unpacking. Merlin doesn’t have any grad classes on Wednesdays, so he took the opportunity to actually work on moving them in. They’ve been living out of boxes for two weeks now, and it’s getting a bit ridiculous. “Now,” says Arthur when they’ve cleared off their chairs and sat down, “tell me what the matter is.”

Arthur’s not superstitious in the least, so Merlin tries to think of a sensible way to explain his feels. And fails miserably. “I don’t know, it sort of feels like a sign.”

“A sign.”

Merlin has the novel feeling of thanking God for Morgana, who has desensitized Arthur to things like this throughout his life. “I start moving us properly into our flat, and the first gift you ever gave me breaks. It sort of feels like it ought to mean something.”

“For the love of--Merlin.” Merlin fidgets and waits for Arthur to scold him for being an idiot, which is at least a weekly occurrence. “What if it means that you don’t need it anymore, now that we’re living together? Not that you don’t need a music player, I know how you get when your life doesn’t have a soundtrack, but this is the beginning of something new.”

Merlin startles them both by laughing. “Have you been taking lessons on how to say the perfect thing from Lancelot or something?”

“Why, are they working?” Arthur wrests the mp3 player out of Merlin’s hands and puts it down on the table. “Have you ordered takeaway yet? I’m assuming from the state of the kitchen that we won’t be cooking tonight.” Not that anything they actually do counts as cooking, if you ask Gwen or any of their other friends. Merlin really needs to sign up for cooking classes at some point, since his graduate courses take up time, but not as much time as Arthur’s job, so he feels sort of responsible for taking care of their flat.

“No, I was going to and then I got sort of distracted.” Merlin chooses not to look at Arthur because Arthur is winning all the Best Boyfriend Awards ever tonight and it would be unfair to dock points for the smirk Arthur’s sure to be wearing right now when he’s trying so hard. “Pizza?”

“Sounds lovely. I rather like this coming home to someone else taking care of everything thing, why didn’t we move in together before?”

“Because you’re stubborn,” says Merlin, and takes out his mobile to call their usual pizza place.

They spend the rest of the night lazing around, eating the massive pizza that Merlin orders for them (half pepperoni for Arthur, who would probably be a carnivore if Merlin let him, and half pineapple for Merlin because he likes it even if Arthur does mock him for not even having proper Hawaiian) and watching telly even though it’s some horribly overdramatic period piece and neither of them can stop laughing at it.

Merlin wakes up the next morning when Arthur leaves for work, as usual, and goes off to the university for his class. When he comes back for lunch, there’s a package on the table with a lurid orange tulip attached to it, and Merlin grins as he opens it, because apparently Arthur wasn’t leaving for work, he was leaving to go order Merlin a surprise and was willing to be late to work as a result. Sure enough, inside there’s an mp3 player, the brightest and shiniest model on the market with plenty of memory and a paper boasting its long warranty. He flips it over automatically and smiles at the new inscription: _Music fills the infinite between two souls._

He calls Arthur, since it’s just about his lunch hour. “You Googled that quote, didn’t you?” he asks when Arthur picks up the phone, and listens to Arthur laugh.


End file.
